Story in The New York Times this morning about efforts in the Texas Legislature to cut back testing and course requirements for graduation from high school. If you sort through, most the alligator-tears for poor kids supposedly being pushed to learn too much stuff come from tea party types like…
Winston Edmondson has had his hands in local politics (he ran for Mayor of Lewisville a couple years ago), AM talk radio (on a couple different outlets) and, fortunately for us, is a big fan of unharvested local music talent. He’s a big fan of Salim Nourallah, Chris Holt and…
Now, we all know concerts, quite aside from genre, come in varying degrees of loudness. There are the kind of gigs (has anyone here seen Unsane?) where, even if you shout as loudly as you can directly into your friend’s ear from an inch away, they will not be able…
Dear Mexican: We’re in state testing this week at the high school I teach at. After the students finish a section, they can only sit and read or just sit. I did an experiment: I chose the cholo-est, tatted, pierced non-reader and dropped your book on their desk. Students who…
What are we in for? Before we can understand the accountability wars heating up now in the Dallas school system, we have to see the battle from a statistical helicopter. First let’s fly over the North and East Dallas high schools that still have significant remnant white student populations. At…
What to make of the big boot at JC Penney? CEO Ronald B. Johnson came tumbling out that door grabbing for his hat like a riverboat gambler evicted from First Baptist. Sometimes it’s hard to look cool. But what’s the big picture in this picture? Is there ever a big…
Everybody knows the Shakespeare quote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s the stuff of T-shirts. But how many people know what it was about? In Henry VI, Dick the Butcher proposes killing all of England’s lawyers as the first step toward accomplishing the treasonous plot…
Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
All right, maybe it wasn’t enormously helpful of me to suggest last July that we bulldoze Fair Park, the 277-acre dilapidated wasteland one mile southeast of downtown that once housed the 1936 Texas Centennial Exhibition. But, c’mon. Why would we just let it just sit there and molder into the…
Lindsey BestAndrew Youssef [Editor’s Note: Longtime concert photographer Andrew Youssef found out almost two years ago that he had Stage IV Colon Cancer. In that time, he has continued to shoot tons of music events for our sister paper OC Weekly on top of other freelance work and working a…
Is it too soon and maybe even bad luck to say this out loud? Is it even possible that Governor Oops could be over? I’m knocking on wood, tossing salt over my shoulder, making the sign of the cross with my index fingers and looking for garlic in the kitchen…
Dear Mexican: Please explain to me why so many mexicanas seem to think it more important to stay home and baby-sit than to attend school (so that they may become more in life than producers of offspring). As an educator, I have faced “absent on account of child care” as…
We all know by now that the high school in the affluent enclave communities of Highland Park and University Park is under siege from bomb and weapons threats. The FBI has joined local police in a so-far fruitless effort to catch whoever is behind a series of written bomb threats,…
On March 22, I penned a story for this page in which I portrayed school district trustee Bernadette Nutall as appearing to be “neutral” on school reform. Her apparent neutrality made her a very singular exception to the rule at a heated community meeting the night before at Madison High…
Local Music ‘Mericans has been running almost two and a half years now on DC9, and one disappointing shortcoming in writing this column has been the lack of “war stories” from live local stages: odd, unforgettable things seen. Not sure what the problem is! Sure, there’s been a few interesting…
I’m scared. One, I’m scared because of what’s going on in Kaufman County. Two, I’m even more scared because of what’s going on here, which seems to be one big stupid-fest. You will remember, perhaps, that Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins brought criminal charges last year against Al Hill…
“How does anyone even get to Dallas?” It wasn’t a question my friend was asking over dinner. It came across more like a statement. It doesn’t feel transient here to me, but as I start to mentally take inventory of my social circle, I realize how many are from California,…
Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
When I was the adolescent son of a family of modest means in a factory town in Michigan, I won a scholarship to study French by living for a summer with a French working class family. It had some to do with my being a damned good French student, some…
Lindsey BestAndrew Youssef [Editor’s Note: Longtime concert photographer Andrew Youssef found out almost two years ago that he had Stage IV Colon Cancer. In that time, he has continued to shoot tons of music events for our sister paper OC Weekly on top of other freelance work and working a…
UPDATE: HPISD sent a letter in response to this post, and because it’s too long to publish in our comments, we’ve added to the end. I have a column coming out in next week’s paper about the bomb and gun threats at Highland Park High School. It was inspired by…
Welcome to Alice Column, in which Alice Laussade writes stories about things on (roughly) the same day of (roughly) every week, making it (roughly) a column. Got an idea for a column? Start your own blog and write it up, you lazy shit. As you walk up to the magic…
